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Comment by miguelrochefort | Hacker News Reader

Why are we still editing text in 2017? Shouldn't someone have come up with something radically better by now?

Plain text is an extremely simple, open and universal format, a local optimum in the design space. It has been with us in various forms for over 100 years ever since the first telegram systems. Ascii has existed since the early 60's and still exists today as a subset of UTF8. It will no doubt outlive almost any other binary encoding currently in existence.

Surely you could make that argument about text other than source code? Why write scripts for television shows instead of using computers to make diagrams of the plot? Why put words in instruction manuals instead of cartoon pictures showing how to use the item? (Granted, that works for Ikea.) Why use textbooks for instruction when you could videotape the lectures instead? For any application where there's an alternative, even a popular one, text endures.

I make the case for all of them. I'm convinced that natural language is humanity's bottleneck and should be replaced if we want progress.

I'm actively working on a new communication paradigm that I hope will make natural languages obsolete.

Your comment is entirely consistent with that position :) I appreciate the irony of asking if you've written anything about your new communication paradigm, but, well, have you?

You can probably find bits and pieces in my comment history, but I have not yet organized my thoughts on paper.

What I have in mind is basically anticipatory computing.

For anybody curious, I did a quick search and came up with these:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14941564

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10567261

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10774715

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12296347

The posts are chronological, so you can kind of see the idea developing in Mr. Rochefort's mind.

Computing as we know it is not even a century old and we already had several radically shift in it.

Compared to house building, medicine or transportation... We had millenniums of experience with them and yet we don't revolutionize them every decade.

Things take time.

Let's try find balance in what we got already. Once we have a hold on that, we'll have plenty of opportunity for the rest. Innovation is not an endangered concept in the human specie.

One wonders why you aren't asking the same questions of spoken word. The answer is probably that what we do right now is actually very efficient, well-tested, broadly applicable, and easy to learn.

I am extremely critical of spoken words as well. I'm convinced that natural languages should and will be replaced by something better in the near future. I'm actually working on it.

Better in what way, exactly? More expensive? Doesn't use built-in biological facilities? Requires software updates and network synchronization? Children can't use it?

- You'll never have to say the same thing twice (since the system you communicate through remembers)

- You'll rarely have to say something explicitly (because most of the things can be anticipated for you)

- You'll never say ambiguous things (because everything is semantically clear and verified)

- You won't be able to contradict yourself or express paradoxes (because the meaning is verified and tested for coherence)

- You'll never have to adapt your output to an other persons input (because the translation and contextual reformulation is made for you, think responsive speech)

Why are we still using the wheel and fire in 2017?

Some people just want to watch the world turn and burn.

This comment appears every single time there's a discussion on the unwieldiness of code as text, probably ever since online discussions were a thing. Shouldn't someone have come up with something radically better by now (instead of just complaining about it)?

Leaving the text the way it is?

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